Small Ironies

"Come to the window, Fredericka. See the show that nature puts on just for us."

With pain in her eyes and her shoulders she pulls herself up from the easy chair and makes her way over to the window seat where Mikhael is perched. The closer she comes to the window the easier it is for her see the vast expanse of weather-related show the boys have been watching so closely. The sky is only showing distant, tiny patches of blue. All the rest is a multitude of gray shades, an almost infinite number of them from near jet black to distinctly pure white. The rising and falling of the wind moves the clouds through this half-tone world at variable speeds and with varying positions in the sky, sometimes rising upward, sometimes sinking close to the ground or at least to the trees and the building roofs.

"It is sort of pretty, isn’t it?" she says reluctantly.

"Yeah," Max replies from his own seat.

"Come over here, Max," Freddy says to him. "There’s plenty of room for three on this seat."

"I’m okay."

"Come. On."

They repeat this exchange a few more times and finally Max pulls himself up onto his knees and edges his way backward until his feet hit the floor. He walks a bit stiff-legged over to the other window where Freddy had joined Mikhael. Slowly he sits down on the far edge.

"You’re too far away, Max," Freddy says to him. "Move over here, closer."

"Why? I’m okay here."

"We should all see the same thing, the exact same thing," Freddy continues. "Come and sit really close. We’ll put our heads together and see exactly the same things."

"I’m really just fine."

"Max! I’m the invalid and this is what I want from you. Now, please."

He thinks for a moment, then speaks again. "Won’t I be too heavy for you? Freddy, you’ll be pressed between Mikhael and me and that will put a lot of weight on your body."

"I won’t mind. If it hurts I’ll tell you. Okay?"

"I guess." He moves over and slowly leans in against Freddy who is already being supported by Mikhael’s body, his outstretched left arm cradling her shoulders. "Is this all right? I’m not too heavy, right?"

"No. You’re fine." The three of them press their heads together and, as close as their six eyes could possibly be, they stare out at the impending storm. Freddy notices that Mikhael’s hand is no longer holding firmly the muscles in her shoulder. She can still feel the weight of his arm across her shoulder blades, but his hand has moved elsewhere. She tries to stare out of the side of her eyes, to see if she can find his hand, but the Olympian task of moving her eyes that far to the left is painful and she lets it go. Instead she closes her eyes and tries to imagine his hand and where it could be.

What she sees, or at any rate imagined she could see, was Mikhael’s hand on the back of Max’s neck. It is obvious, she feels, when she thinks about it. It is about as far as any arm could reach and it made Max more a part of their triad. Held close in this way, Freddy can imagine their relationship to the property itself, how their bodies relate to the building and its own position on the street. Her mind goes directly to these things and not to anything more personal.

“Are you okay, Max?" she asks.

"Yeah, fine."

"Mikhael? You?"

"This is good with me."

"Okay then." She is aware of Mikhael’s hand moving against Max’s neck now. The tendons and the muscles in his arm move rhythmically against her upper back and she knows without knowing how she knew it, that the end result of all that rhythmic pulsation means his fingers are moving into a clench and relax, clench and relax, massaging of Max’s body. She feels a rush of jealousy which she submerges with a gulping of air.